"My dear fellow!" he interrupted ingratiatingly.
"I'm not a business man," continued the Poet hotly. "You all of you told me that, and I'm disposed to say: 'Thank God, I'm not.'"
The Iron King put his hat carefully out of reach and forced a smile.
"You mustn't take it like that, old chap," he said soothingly. "I—we—all of us are doing our best. Now we won't bother about dressing; let's go straight in and thrash the thing out over a bottle of wine."
Instructing his butler very audibly to open a bottle of the 1906 Lanson, he slipped his arm through the Poet's and led him, sullenly murmuring, into the dining-room. With the second bottle of champagne, his guest ceased to be aggrieved and became quarrelsome; when the port wine appeared, he had the Iron King cowed and broken in moral.
"If you find fault with everything, why do you come here, why stay here?" complained the Iron King with a last flickering effort to recover his independence.
"Why don't you find me some other place to go to, as you promised?" the Poet retorted, as he made his way to the morning-room and sat down to order a month's supply of underclothes from his hosier.
III
The Iron King always boasted that honesty was the best policy and that he was invariably willing to put his cards on the table. The Millionaire had once professed himself likely to be satisfied if the Iron King would only remove the fifth ace from his sleeve, and a certain coolness between the two men resulted. In general, however, he had the reputation of a frank, bluff fellow.
On the morrow of the Poet's arrival, he remained in bed and announced in the quavering pencil-strokes of a sick man, that he was suffering from anthrax, which, he might add, was not only painful but infectious. The Poet scrawled across one corner of the note that anthrax was usually fatal, but that, as he himself had twice had it, he would risk taking it a third time in order to be with his friend. Thereupon the Iron King departed to the city, leaving the Poet to dictate blank verse to the pretty young secretary, who curled both feet round one leg of her chair, told him that she "loved his potry more'n anythink she'd ever read" and asked how all the hard words like "chrysoprase" and "asphdel" were spelt. That night a telegram arrived shortly before dinner, and the Iron King announced that the Ministry of Munitions was sending him to America to stabilize iron prices.